From the Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of Billion Dollar Whale and Blood and Oil, and co-host of the Whale Hunting podcast, comes a dazzling true story of how a lost masterpiece came home and of the remarkable, flawed man who made it happen.
British art dealer Oliver Hoare had spent his life moving effortlessly among aristocrats, museum curators, and billionaires. A charismatic man about town in 1990s London, his intelligence and charm had attracted even the likes of Princess Diana, who became his paramour. But his greatest challenge was still ahead: orchestrating the return of Iran’s most sacred cultural treasure, the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp, to Tehran.
Created by master artisans in the sixteenth century, the 118 surviving paintings of the Shahnameh had mesmerized emperors and collectors for hundreds of years. The Persian masterpiece had survived five centuries of war, theft, and dismemberment, transported by camels across ancient borders. Now, it sat locked in an underground bank vault in London—waiting to go home.
The revolutionary government wasn’t able to pay, but there was the possibility of a unique trade. Deep in the climate-controlled vaults beneath Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art, hidden since the Islamic Revolution, lay one of the greatest collections of Western art ever assembled—works by Picasso, Pollock, Warhol, and, most prized of all, Willem de Kooning’s Woman III, a painting worth hundreds of millions of dollars that the Islamic Republic considered an offense to public morality. To bring the Shahnameh home, Hoare had to do the impossible: negotiate directly with the Islamic Republic, navigate a minefield of international sanctions, and coax a de Kooning out of Tehran.
As the deal of a lifetime approached its climax, Hoare’s private life threatened to destroy everything. His relationship with Diana was spiraling into one of the most explosive royal scandals of the decade, threatening to detonate just as the fate of a priceless national treasure hung in the balance.
The Missing Masterpiece of Tehran is the sweeping true story of one of the most extraordinary art deals in modern history—a tale of beauty, obsession, and scandal that reminds us we don’t possess great art. It possesses us.
